In this paper, we characterize equilibria in games of electoral competition between three or more office-seeking candidates. Recognizing that electoral equilibrium involves both candidates’ and voters’ strategies, we first prove existence of pure strategy electoral equilibria when candidates seek to maximize their vote share. Accordingly, the main difficulty with electoral equilibria is multipl...

Authenticity is a popular buzz word in electoral politics, as electoral candidates and politicians are expected to be authentic in their public interactions. Since 2008, social media has become an integral part of elections in the US, and continues to gain importance in electoral campaigns around the world as social media offers electoral candidates a new medium for communicating with their con...

The existing empirical literature in comparative politics holds that social cleavages affect the number of candidates or parties when electoral institutions are “permissive.” However, this literature lacks a theoretical account of the strategic candidate entry and exit decisions that ultimately determine electoral coalitions under different institutions in plural societies. This paper incorpora...

The conventional wisdom in political science is that legislators’ electioneering practices are closely linked to the electoral systems in which they compete.1 Since electoral concerns are argued to shape legislators’ representation and policy decisions, understanding how electoral incentives differ across electoral systems is useful for explaining cross-national differences representation and p...

Elements of an economic theory of political institutions are introduced. A variety of electoral systems are reviewed. Cox’s threshold is shown to measure incentives for diversity and specialization of candidates’ positions, when the number of serious candidates is given. Duverger’s law and its generalizations are discussed, to predict the number of serious candidates. Duverger’s law is interpre...

This article presents an electoral model where activist groups contribute resources to their favored parties. These resources are then used by the party candidates to enhance the electoral perception of their quality or valence. We construct an empirical model of the United States presidential election of 2008 and employ the electoral perception of the character traits of the two candidates. We...

This paper describes the competitive strategies of political parties – aiming at maximising electoral support – in the early years of democratic elections. By spreading through geographical space in search of votes, candidates and parties challenged adversaries in their traditional strongholds, a process which led to the reduction of the number of safe seats and uncontested constituencies. Evid...

In this essay we address the puzzle that exists in American politics based on the tension of convergence to the electoral mean because of the MVT (mean voter theorem) and the studies showing divergence in candidate positioning.We provide amodel in which voters and states are not treated equally because of vast regional differences. In contrast with the MVT, candidates who campaign in each state...

In the multi-dimensional spatial model of elections with two policymotivated candidates, we prove that the candidates must adopt the same policy platform in equilibrium. Moreover, when the number of voters is odd, if the gradients of the candidates’ utility functions point in different directions, then they must locate at some voter’s ideal point and a strong symmetry condition must be satisfie...